Trump Surge Freakout: More Violence Against Supporters

As Election Day nears and the GOP nominee rises, attacks on his backers, signs and buildings are escalating

Physical attacks on Donald Trump supporters and their personal property appear to be growing increasingly common as Election Day approaches and passions intensify.

As LifeZette recently reported, there was a foiled assassination attempt at a Trump rally and many Trump supporters have been beaten up or hit with flying objects throughout the course of the fall campaign.

“I think there is desperation by Democrats that Trump is actually gaining in the polls and it looks real good that he’s going to win.”

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While the mainstream media has relentlessly promoted Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, it has largely ignored or downplayed these violent attacks against supporters of Donald Trump.

For example, the national media paid little attention to a Trump supporter being shot by a Trump detractor in Ohio.

In late July an unidentified 60-year-old man was shot in the leg at Winston’s Bar on Cleveland’s East Side. His assailant, Darnell Hall, 45, shot him after their discussion of presidential politics grew heated. The attacker “was enraged that anyone in the overwhelmingly African-American bar would support the GOP nominee,” the Plain Dealer reports. Hall later surrendered to police and was charged with felonious assault.

Two UCLA students told Sean Hannity on Oct. 25 they’ve seen a lot of anti-Trump violence on campus. Haley Nieves said protesters crashed one of their pro-Trump rallies. “They were stomping on the American flag during the event and even attempting to burn it afterward.” Dominique Blair said, “You face crazy leftist mobs that are not tolerant of your views whatsoever, and it turns into a lot of bad debates. Sometimes violent, sometimes hitting and fights. I’ve been all around it.” Blair added, “I am treated very poorly on my campus and other campuses. It’s very hard to be a conservative activist in Los Angeles.”

On Oct. 26 a man dressed as a construction worker took a sledgehammer and a pick-ax to Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Deadline Hollywood reports. The vandalism obliterated Trump’s name on the sidewalk. The man identified himself to a reporter as Jamie Otis. Trump’s star was dedicated in 2007 to recognize his work on the NBC TV show “The Apprentice.” Otis “said he originally intended to remove Trump’s star completely to auction it off next month in New York to raise funds for the women who have recently come forward to accuse Trump of sexually assaulting them over the decades.”

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Afterwards, a homeless black woman guarded what was left of the star. The woman held a sign that reads, “20 Million Illegals and Americans Sleep on the Streets in Tents. Vote Trump.” Clinton supporters raided the woman’s shopping cart and hurled abuse at her.

As an angry mob tore up her signs, one man told her “You spewed hate and you got hate.” He added, “You got exactly what you were dishing out. I told you. I warned you.”

Attacks on election signs have been widespread in this presidential election cycle.

“While signs were often stolen or spray-painted in past elections, local law enforcement in several swing states told NBC News the vitriol has never been this tangible,” NBC reported Nov. 4. “In Nevada, Reno police Officer Tim Broadway said campaign-based vandalism has been more prevalent this season than during any election in his 12-year career.”

“A lot of it is the nature of the two candidates who are running,” Broadway said.

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David Jones, chairman of the Making Maine Great Again political action committee, told NBC he bought 5,000 signs and distributed them across Maine’s first congressional district. Thieves stole about 1,000 of the signs, he estimates.

“We were finding that we would put them up one day and they’d be gone the next, if they lasted a day,” Jones said. “They would be destroyed, stolen, painted, cut. It’s unbelievable how people reacted to it.”

Many violent attacks at pro-Trump events appear to have been orchestrated by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and senior operatives in the Democratic National Committee. Undercover videos shot by ACORN slayer James O’Keefe’s group Project Veritas Action caught senior Democrat consultants Robert Creamer and Scott Foval acknowledging using dirty, likely illegal tricks against the Trump campaign. Both have since resigned from the DNC, a move some consider to be an admission of guilt. Their goal was to generate negative media coverage of Trump rallies by fomenting violence at them. The media eagerly used the various altercations Democrats created to attempt to discredit Trump by depicting his supporters as violent, knuckle-dragging crazies.

Foval said on camera his agents “infiltrate” Trump events. “It doesn’t matter what the friggin’ legal and ethics people say, we need to win this motherf**ker.” He adds, “we’re starting anarchy here.”

In one video Creamer says Hillary Clinton personally knows about the false flag operation. Her campaign “is fully in it,” he says. “Hillary knows through the chain of command what’s going on.” Previously convicted of felony bank fraud, Creamer has close personal ties to President Obama and has visited the Obama White House 342 times including 47 meetings with Obama personally.

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One of the visits even took place in Obama’s personal living quarters. “It’s a very big deal that Creamer visited the president’s residence in the White House,” a former senior White House employee told this writer. “White House employees can work there for years and never visit the residence.”

As previously reported, violent demonstrators from left-wing organizations including MoveOn, Black Lives Matter, and People for Bernie forced the cancelation of a planned Trump rally March 11 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The belligerent anti-Trump activists streamed into the event and later celebrated shutting it down. The event, which led to the arrest of four people, received a great deal of media attention though much of it focused on how peaceful the protesters supposedly were.

The abortive Chicago rally received plenty of national media attention but a Trump rally in St. Louis, Mo., that same day that was besieged by violent demonstrators was largely ignored.

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KTLA reported at the time that at least 32 people were arrested in protests both inside and outside Trump’s rally at the Peabody Opera House. “Thirty-one people were charged with disturbing the peace, and one was charged with third-degree assault,” the TV station reported.

The March 11 rally in Chicago seems to have been the launch of the Left’s campaign of violence and intimidation aimed at Trump and his supporters.

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As Noah Rothman wrote at Commentary:

“What followed Chicago was a campaign of unreciprocated leftist violence targeting conservative Trump supporters across the country. On several occasions, Trump-backers were harassed and attacked by leftist demonstrators, much of which occurred with minimal national press coverage or which was characterized as the inevitable result of Trump’s provocations.”

Here is a compilation of some of the attacks on Trump supporters that were left out of this writer’s previous article on anti-Trump violence:

On Nov. 4 obscene messages including “F**k Trump yessir” were spray-painted on the Alamance County, N.C., Republican Party headquarters in Burlington, the News & Observer reports. The local GOP called the incident an “act of political violence.”

On Nov. 4 the Denver, Colo., Trump campaign office was vandalized, 9News reports. Windows were spray-painted and “Trump = thief” was spray-painted on a brick wall.

Fox 5 reported Nov. 3 that several Trump signs were spray-painted, kicked, and ripped along Minnieville Road in Woodbridge, Va. The Prince William County Republican Party has filed eight police reports about vandalism.

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Corey Stewart, chairman of the county’s board of supervisors and former Trump campaign chairman for Virginia, blames Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “I think there is desperation by Democrats that Trump is actually gaining in the polls and it looks real good that he’s going to win, not just the country, but he could very well win Virginia.”

On Nov. 1 Students for Hillary members harassed pro-Trump students and destroyed Trump campaign signs at a rally at Penn State University’s University Park campus in State College, Campus Reform reports. Members of the expressly pro-Trump Bull Moose Party group built a temporary wall around a flagpole and placed Trump signs on it. University administrators had previously refused to allow students to use the name “Trump” in the name of their club citing bogus legal concerns.

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On Oct. 31 in Easton, Mass. a man in a Halloween costume pulled up a Trump lawn sign and destroyed it, NECN reports. “I think it’s just very unfortunate that people won’t allow me to express my opinion in a pretty peaceful way,” said homeowner Steven Salvucci. “It’s just a sign in the street.”

On Oct. 31 a Youth for Trump sign was ripped down at the University of Pittsburgh with such force that the tree limb it was posted on broke, Campus Reform reports. Lindsey Hern, a senior, said the group’s booth was surrounded by an angry profanity-screaming mob. One female student shouted at her, “how can you be a woman and support Trump?” Hern said she was “horrified and scared for my safety because of my views.” A few days earlier students flipped a Youth for Trump table over on campus.

On the night of Oct. 29-30, vandals spray-painted anti-Trump slogans and “obscene sexual images” on the Wooddale United Church in East Stroudsburg, Penn., the Pocono Record reports.

On Oct. 25 Ronnie Sartain’s home in Gainesville, Fla. was vandalized, the Gainesville Sun reports. Sartain found a 5-foot-high purple swastika painted on his garage door and swastikas painted on his walkway and on his Trump yard sign. One of his neighbors also complained to police about finding swastikas painted on his truck and Trump sign.

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In Provo, Utah, Loy Brunson’s Trump signs and those of his neighbors were vandalized, Good4Utah reported Oct. 20. “Amerikkka” was painted on his car.

On Oct. 24 in Reno, Nev., veteran-owned Macabee Arms LTD was vandalized. A Trump sign was spray-painted over in black paint along with a vehicle, KOLO reports.

TV station WITN reported Oct. 19 that shots had been fired late at night two days earlier at the front windows of the Pamlico County Republican Party Headquarters in Bayboro, N.C. County GOP chairman Dave Wickersham said two large Trump signs were vandalized. This was the second such incident in the prior three weeks.

On Oct. 11 Hillary Clinton supporters ripped down a temporary wall made of boxes at the Fort Collins campus of Colorado State University that bore the Trump slogan “Make America Great Again.” Juan Caro, chairman of student organization Conservative Interest Group, told Campus Reform that many students were shouted down as they expressed political views, and that he was personally called an “ignorant Hispanic, stupid, and f**ked in the head” for backing Trump.

On Oct. 8 two landscaping bricks were hurled through a window at the Delaware County Republican Party office in Muncie, Ind., Fox59 reports. Signs for Trump and local candidates were on display in the window at the time.

On Oct. 1 the brand new Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., was vandalized. “Black Lives Matter” was spray-painted at the hotel entrance. The other phrase painted was “No Justice, [No] Peace,” with the second “no” expressed using a red circle with a slash.

On Sept. 7 at the University of California at Berkeley a group of obscenity-shouting students attacked a College Republicans recruiting table on campus. “A group of protesters with a megaphone confronted our table and proceeded to snatch and attempt to rip up our Donald Trump cut-out,” Berkeley College Republicans president Jose Diaz told the College Fix.

On May 24 at DePaul University in Chicago, supporters of Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter harassed and tried to intimidate Trump supporter Milo Yiannopoulos, an outspoken gay conservative journalist and activist who showed up to give a speech. The activists occupied the stage and threatened to punch Yiannopoulos, Breitbart News (the employer of Yiannopoulos) reports. The school forced event organizers and Breitbart to hire security guards for the event, but they refused to intervene.

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Also on May 24, shots from a pellet gun shattered a window at the Albuquerque Convention Center during a Trump rally inside. Protesters tried to disrupt the rally by shouting and holding banners that read “Trump is Fascist” and “We’ve heard enough” and resisted being removed by security. “Outside in the parking lot, it at times had all the makings of a riot … Earlier in the evening demonstrators tried to break their way into the building,” Carl Cameron of Fox News reported. “At one point a vendor with Trump t-shirts and hats had his table overturned and someone tried to set it on fire.” Local police said “several” officers were hit by rocks and received medical attention. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) described the protesters as a “rent-a-mob.”

On March 9, Judy Beaty discovered her home in Gainesville, Va., had been vandalized and her Trump lawn signs stolen, Fox 5 reports. “Revolution” and “Can you see the new world through the tear gas” were spray-painted on the front and side of her house. Beaty said her family members were victims of a “political hate crime.” The previous week three of her Trump lawn signs were stolen, she added.

This is not an exhaustive list of all the violent acts perpetrated against Americans who support Donald Trump’s candidacy for the highest office in the land.

And there are still three days remaining before Election Day.

Matthew Vadum is senior vice president at the Capital Research Center.